I grew up involved in theatre and its associates – drama classes, plays and musicals, dance and dance recitals, chorus and choral concerts. I attended improv shows, student and professional performances of all kinds, and sought out live music in cafés and on street corners. I grew up in a town with an annual, famous, phenomenal jazz festival, which I still miss attending.

I was a young teenager when my guitar teacher and I started playing around with jazz, which did not captivate me then like it would when I was a bit older. Far too uncertain and afraid of making mistakes to just give it a try, I looked for the right notes, something that would undoubtedly work, and missed the opportunity to enter the unknown and see where it would take me. Nowadays, I go through phases of playing the guitar and am immensely grateful to have brought it with me all over the world. Rather a lot of guitar improv has taken place since I asked my teacher if we could do something else.

Considering this, I had to laugh at myself when, in response to a friend’s query about how my little family and I are doing, I answered “We have something like a jazz rhythm going on – not a routine but rather patterns, and some more predictable than others.”

I don’t think I’ve ever compared life to jazz before, but I’m certainly not the first one to do it. And upon reflection, I find that’s not a bad way to think about parenting in the stage where we are right now. There’s a general flow to the day, lots of twists, turns, bumps, and happenings, and a general flow to the evenings and nights. Anything and everything can happen in between and it does. Plans are in quotation marks because little goes according to plan, but appointments are kept and meet-ups occur. As soon as we think we’ve figured something out, our sweet baby grows and changes and we start all over again.

And just like a good rhythm, jazz or otherwise, there’s an undercurrent, a steadiness holding it all together, that one can always find and fall back on. In the case of being a parent, it’s the purest form of love.